Ready-To-Eat (RTE) cereals are popular food products typically consumed with milk. For added convenience, there have been many efforts in the food industry to develop portable ready-to-eat cereal food products in bar form. Many such bar products are currently commercially available, such as the familiar granola bar. Such products are distinguished from cookies, dessert bars or like products by absence of a flour-based batter as a structuring agent and are not typically prepared by baking or other finish cooking step. Rather, a loose mixture of RTE cereal particles is admixed with a high proportion of a sugar syrup binder. The admixture is then pressed into slabs, cut into individually sized and shaped pieces and packaged.
While convenient and useful, such cereal bar products can suffer from one or more consumer complaints. Foremost, conventional cereal bar products can be too sweet in taste for some adult consumers. The excessive sweetness is due to the need to employ high proportions of the sugar syrup binder needed to provide a product that is a solid mass suitable for forming into a shaped form that retains its shape, e.g., bar or square that retains its form. For certain nutrition conscious consumers, e.g., diabetics, high sugar(s) content is also undesirable.
Of course, efforts have been made to provide products in shaped form, such as bars that comprise puffed cereal pieces with lesser quantities of sugar slurry binder. However, as the amount of sugar syrup or slurry binder is reduced, the formulations, after cooling to set the binder, become progressively a mixture of softer or more loosely bound particles until forming a mere quantity of loosely bound particulates rather than a solid mass.
Still another approach to providing a shaped food product having enough binder to provide a solid mass, but with reduced sweetness, is to substitute a portion of the more sweet binding sugars with less sweet carbohydrates equivalents, such as maltose sugars and/or maltodextrins. However, while binders comprising sugar replacements are less sweet, such products can exhibit other undesirable attributes. For example, products comprising high levels of maltodextrin as a binder constituent can be quite hard and glassy in texture. Also, even though the products are firm and less sweet, they can be objectionable as being too high in sugars and too low in the cereal component.
Yet another technique for providing shaped or bar products of reduced binder levels is to use compression or compaction to force the particulates closer together. While the mixture of cereal and binder is still warm and soft, a mass of cereal base and binder can be pressed by compression rollers to form sheets. These sheets are allowed to cool and harden and are then slit into suitably sized pieces such as by cutting longitudinally into ribbons and then transversely into individual pieces.
While useful for modest reductions in binder, such techniques (especially when a puffed or otherwise frangible cereal base is employed) can result in high percentages of product that are broken and/or crushed or deformed. Products with so few, if any, remaining whole cereal pieces suffer from another consumer complaint regarding appearance. Furthermore, the cutting step results in relatively sharp edges or surfaces. Such products further have flat top and bottom surfaces due to the compression step, which, together with the sharp edges, impart a harsh and undesirably mechanical appearance aspect to the products, which is another visual or appearance complaint from consumers.
Still another consumer complaint is that such products are too hard or tough in texture. While softer products, e.g., soft and chewy granola bars, are well known, such products are either sticky due to required sugars formulation and amount of binder or otherwise require use of a “non-natural” humectant ingredient, such as glycerol or other polyhydric alcohol. Compaction (described above) can also aggravate the tough or heard eating quality.
These problems are difficult to overcome with unexpanded cereal products, such as granola bars, comprising unpuffed oat flakes or similar type products comprising slightly puffed cereal flakes such as corn or wheat flakes (e.g., Golden Grahams® bars). These problems are even more severe for products comprising puffed pieces such as whole grain oat “O” Cheerios® pieces or puffed spheres e.g., Kix® puffed corn pieces. Not only are such puffed shapes more fragile and more easily prone to damage, but also the individual pieces are larger and are more rounded.
In still other variations, a higher moisture binder is employed to form sheets or pieces of the particulates. These forms can then be baked or dried to remove the excess water to form bars or pieces. Again, while useful, such baking or drying steps can require extra equipment and steps to practice product preparation and can also adversely affect heat sensitive additives such as dried fruits or chocolate chips.
Another taste and appearance complaint is that while such current cereal bar products often contain dried fruit pieces, such as raisins, the dried fruit lack taste and appearance appeal. There have also been several attempts to include highly oxygen sensitive ingredients, such as freeze-dried fruits, in these products. However, such products rapidly lose their quality upon oxygen exposure.
Thus, there is a continuing need for new and improved portable food products that have an acceptable sweetness level, contain primarily unbroken pieces, and have an adequate shelf life.